Now, the company behind the French Autolib’ scheme is bringing its four-seater city cars to London, putting 50 vehicles on the streets of the capital more than a year behind schedule.
Bluecity, backed by the French Bolloré conglomerate, will in February become London’s first fully zero-emissions car club when it launches the fleet of red cars designed by Pininfarina, the Italian car body maker famed for its work with Ferrari. “Car sharing reduces the number of cars in the city and it is a showcase,” says Cédric Bolloré, head of business development at BlueSolutions, the Bolloré group’s green technology division. “It shows to people who might be reluctant to drive an electric car that it is convenient, affordable and enjoyable.”
Car clubs are increasingly finding favour in cities as a way of cutting congestion and pollution, while carmakers are pushing to find ways of maintaining revenues in preparation for an expected shift away from vehicle ownership.
London Mayor Boris Johnson wants the capital to have 1m car club members by 2025, compared with about 135,000 at the beginning of this year, and the car club industry has committed to making 50 per cent of its vehicles ultra-low emission by that stage.
Schemes, such as Zipcar and BMW’s DriveNow, can allow drivers to cut the cost of car ownership while addressing the fact that most people’s cars sit idle for about 97 per cent of the time.
DriveNow, a “free-floating” scheme that allows drivers to move between any parking space within four London boroughs, has its own fleet of 50 fully electric i3 cars as well as 240 Minis and BMW 1 Series. Zipcar operates on a “round-trip” model, where cars are returned to their original parking space. It has more than 1,500 cars in London.
Bluecity’s electric vehicles will be the first scheme to run on a “point-to-point” model in the capital, moving between parking stations in at least seven boroughs and operating much like the capital’s Boris bikes. Having originally planned to launch before the end of 2014, Bluecity has been frustrated by the politics of dealing with London’s 33 local authorities, each of whom control local parking.
It has also been dogged by controversy. Bluecity is a sister company of Bluepoint London, another part of the Bolloré group, which purchased the capital’s electric charging infrastructure in September last year from Transport for London for £1m.
Rival car clubs and other charge point providers are uncomfortable that a company running crucial electric car infrastructure wants to operate an electric fleet that relies on the same charging points. The Bolloré group’s critics say it simply wanted to control the charge points and, crucially, the associated parking bays that would allow it to operate its car club.
“They’re not interested in charging networks. They’re interested in running a car club,” says David Martell, chief executive of Chargemaster, a charge point manufacturer and installer.
He admits that the car sharing scheme will be a good thing for London. “But I’d be more comfortable if they said, ‘We want to run a car club and the charge points are a means to an end.’ ”
The charging infrastructure has also suffered from a poor state of repair, though Bluepoint says this is again a function of knotty political issues over who is responsible for fixing the charge points.
“In Paris, we had to deal with one person,” says Christophe Arnaud, director of Bluepoint. “Here [in London], we need to convince 33 boroughs. Per council, we need to convince 10 people.”
Bluepoint says that since it took over the charging network from TfL, the charge point availability has improved from 60 per cent to 85 per cent, and it is targeting 95 per cent availability for the end of the year.